Cards (

26.5) at
Hawks (

24)

Game Overview ::

By mike johnson>>

• Both teams enter this game with a 2-3 record but are only one game behind the division leading 49ers.
• Surprisingly to many, Seattle has been a source of fantasy gold this season, sporting the league’s top-rated offense and worst-rated defense through five weeks.
• Backfield injuries have left both teams in different situations than they had for the first few weeks, which may affect play calling and packages for both offenses.
• There is potential for offensive fireworks if these teams decide to air it out, as these defenses rank 31st and 32nd in the NFL in PFF coverage grade.

How Arizona Will Try To Win ::

The Cardinals played a terrific game in Week 5, staying close to the previously dominant Eagles and having a chance late in the game before Kyler Murray had a brain fart at the end of the game that may or may not have been caused by sleep deprivation after the last “Double XP Week” on Call of Duty last Friday. All kidding aside, the close loss was probably the best overall performance they’ve had all season and provided some positive outlook going forward. This is good news, as the Cardinals head to a hostile environment for a road game. They enter with a 2-3 record and have a chance to be tied for the division lead if they win here, and then they get DeAndre Hopkins back from suspension in Week 7. 

The Seahawks defense played man coverage on less than 10% of their snaps the first three weeks, before showing a clear shift in philosophy the last two weeks when they played man coverage on roughly 40% of their snaps, a number that would put them near the top-5 in the league if extrapolated for the whole season so far. It will be interesting to see if the Seahawks continue with this man-heavy approach this week, as they have given up 84 total points in the last two weeks since that change against an offense that was without their top two weapons (Lions without D’Andre Swift and Amon-Ra St. Brown), and an offense with a backup QB (Andy Dalton) who was missing two starting wide receivers (Michael Thomas and Jarvis Landry) and also lost Chris Olave during the game. This decision point for the Seahawks will be an interesting one for the probability of success of the Cardinals offense, as the Cardinals have faced over 25% man coverage only once this season and that was in their Week 2 win over the Raiders, which was their highest scoring game of the season and also the only game in which they amassed over 400 total yards of offense. The Seahawks defense has also had wild swings in their blitz rates through the first five weeks, blitzing on 23, 16, 7, 2, and 33 of their snaps over each of the respective first five weeks. Seattle just appears to be grasping at straws defensively, and hoping something sticks. Unfortunately for us, this makes it hard to accurately project what their approach will be on a week-to-week basis and therefore hard to predict which players they are facing may be in the most advantageous spots to exploit their scheme. On the bright side, Seattle has been very bad at pretty much everything they’ve tried, so offensive success for their opponents is usually a safe bet in some fashion. So far this season, Seattle opponents score an average of 13.1 more points per game against Seattle than they do in their other games.

That’s a lot of information about the Seattle defense, but it’s necessary to evaluate the Arizona offense. The Cardinals don’t alter their scheme much week to week and approach most games with the same spread tendencies and formations, passing near the league average based on game flow expectations, and playing at a moderate pace in neutral game scripts. For weeks, I have spoken in my Edge writeups about the “vanilla” approach of Kliff Kingsbury and how difficult it is to have consistent production when not altering the approach for your personnel and opponents. However, games like this against very poor defenses are where Kingsbury’s scheme can have success and pad stats, making their season-long numbers look much better in the process. Consider this, the Cardinals have played five games this season and three of those games were against defenses ranked in the top half of the league while two of them were against defenses ranked in the bottom half of the league. The three games against top-half defenses were the Cardinals three losses, in which they averaged only 16.7 points per game. The two games against bottom-half defenses were their two wins, in which they averaged 27.5 points per game. The Seahawks, as outlined above, have the league’s worst defense by almost any metric and have made everyone look way better so far this year. It’s funny what happens when you can’t cover anyone and also don’t get pressure on the quarterback.

How seattle Will Try To Win ::